


Parasol

by Dahlia_Llewellyn



Series: Strange Little Girls: A Tori Amos Playlist [1]
Category: Parasol - Tori Amos (Song), Tori Amos (Musician)
Genre: F/M, Inspired by Art, Inspired by Music, Long-Term Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-18
Updated: 2016-04-18
Packaged: 2018-06-03 02:06:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6592312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dahlia_Llewellyn/pseuds/Dahlia_Llewellyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"And the seated woman with a parasol/may be the only one you can't betray./If I'm the seated woman with a parasol,/I will be safe in my frame."--Tori Amos, "Parasol" from the album The Beekeeper (2005)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Parasol

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing a series of Tori Amos-inspired vignettes back in 2014, shortly after a major life upheaval that left me with a good deal of time on my hands. I had always been fascinated by Tori Amos and her beautiful, haunting and often tongue-in-cheek portrayals of women trying to survive the sheer truths of being female. The series is named "Strange Little Girls" in honor of Tori Amos' only cover album, partly because I see these stories as "covers" of the songs she's written, but it also perfectly describes the women in them. 
> 
> "Parasol" was the first one I wrote. I hope you enjoy it.

 

I have been on the bed now for two hours.

I think it must be two hours, but I can’t be sure. I stopped looking at the clock a while back, long before the phone call, long before I locked myself in here with the woman with the parasol.

She is sitting within a cheap gilt frame, one of those cheap paint jobs meant to give the impression of luxury without the cost. In truth, her frame is a garage sale find, just like her—something that is only beautiful from far away, but sturdy nonetheless.

He’s knocking at the door—has been for the past hour or so, another guesstimation on my part—and I stopped paying attention almost immediately. I am done screaming, done crying.

I am opting for oblivion in the form of impressionism, even if he tears down the walls and yells “Here’s Johnny!” Even an axe couldn’t tear me away from the woman on the wall, the one I saw long ago and have been bonding with slowly over the past two years.

* * * * * * * * * *

The painting doesn’t have a name, and I like it better that way. It gives me room to imagine what the context was for this impressionistic photograph of this long-dead woman. When I bought the painting, it actually wasn’t even because I _liked_ the one I have come to fixate on. Quite the opposite—I was a fan of the Monet reproduction of a woman with a parasol in a windswept field—and the seated woman with the parasol just happened to be right behind it, her features not quite as striking as her cohort's, her brush strokes clumsier.

I am convinced that this painting was probably some poor bastard’s attempt at a Monet without the compositional understanding to make it pop. I wasn’t going to get the painting originally, thinking it far too blasé to be paired with a true masterpiece (bear in mind, I wasn’t buying an _actual_ Monet), but Tyler insisted. He said it reminded him of me, and that made me chuckle. I looked at the two side-by-side, pondered a moment, and shrugged. They would make a sweet little diptych in our first “big kid” apartment that we were moving into the next month.

I bought them both, and even got a deal on some frames. A big kid apartment always comes with frames.

 *  * * * * * * * *

He and I met in college, back when we understood the world and knew our place in it. I was getting my degree in art while he was plodding away with numbers in the mathematics departments. We were convinced that we were both lovers of dying arts, priests of an order whose arcana was going the way of the dodo.

I was right on this count, but he remained convinced he was just as put upon as I was. What a queer pair we always were. My mother always told me he was too stiff for me, wild child I that I was, red and orange in my hair and on my palates. I was never about coloring in the lines, and here I was, madly in love with a boy who had been getting the same hair cut from the same barber since he was old enough to make those choices.

And after college, determined that we had the world figured out and that we were in love forever (we were such kids then), we decided to go to grad school. We agreed it was the safest shelter from the madness of a fractured economy (we were so wrong), and we decided to go to the same one together. We had to do it that way, Tyler insisted, or else we would drift away. If there was one thing I couldn’t stand, one thing that brought me to my knees, it was the thought of him being rent from the canvas of my world.

We were such kids once.

 * * * * * * * * * *

As I lay me down to stare,

I tell myself I do not care

What he says and how he pleads,

What he wants and what he needs

He is dead to me

As of 2:17 this afternoon.

* * * * * * * * *

Can you tell me, woman with the parasol, why do storms always have a calm? I ask you, only because you seem calm enough to get it. What were you staring off at? Who were you looking at when you sat for your portrait? How many hours did it take before your butt fell asleep?

He’s still outside the room, but the knocking is getting weaker. I can tell by the way he is talking that he beginning to lose patience, maybe even hope. Did he think he could get away with it? Did he really think I wouldn’t see it?

The sad confession I have to make is that I didn’t see it. This is a shock to me. There was no precursor besides that text. I saw that text…I will never unsee it. What a stupid world we live in where a life can be ruined by less than 140 characters.

**hey hottie where r u?**

 Do you even know what that moment feels like? It’s almost like vomiting, except the only thing coming out is air. It was an aneurysm, a stroke—all of it delivered across a blackberry screen.

I knew it then. Then…I make it sound like this happened ages ago, when it was maybe a little over two hours. By the sun, I think it must be five now. He is quiet now, although I think I hear him crying. He never cries.

You may want to know why I can’t cry. I can’t do anything, to be honest. All I can do is look at you, look out at you, and hope you’ll just let me switch places with you. I’d like to be you, the seated woman with the parasol, the one with the smile that tells me your problems, whatever they are, can’t hurt more than these ones on the other side of the picture frame.

 


End file.
